[safety1st]

I agree. An influencer is just a marketing person. It's gross actually that we call these people creators and compare them to artists, musicians etc.

Artists and musicians produce genuine creative work that creates a great deal of skill and creates a lot of enjoyment. They often do this for little or not money purely out of their love for the medium. Meanwhile influencers post photos of themselves with products in order to get you to buy stuff. Or they record clickbaity YouTube videos interspersed with ads from sponsors. They specifically identify themselves as commercially oriented - the term "influencers" comes from the concept of "influence marketing" which has been around for decades and has simply been taken up a notch online.

It's not on the same level as genuine art, which is not there to change your purchasing habits. All the influencer content is "optimized for engagement" i.e. they have thought about how to get you addicted, so you consume it, but you would be better off if you consumed actual art and music instead.

[keiferski]

The idea of art being purely a non-monetary activity, and that it is somehow "made dirty" by the introduction of money, is largely a 20th century thing. Most of the people you would likely consider "artists" throughout history created most of their art as commissions, for money, to people paying them to create that work. For example - virtually everything Michelangelo created was paid for by a rich benefactor – and yet I certainly wouldn't suggest that he disliked painting/sculpting or wasn't skilled at it.

[safety1st]

No problem with artists getting paid. I do have a problem with people who are specifically paid to advertise a product calling themselves anything other than marketers!

Michaelangelo got paid to produce art, "creators" get paid to flog a VPN. The difference in quality between what the two produce is notable!

[keiferski]

This is a pretty simplistic understanding of how modern art/content markets work. Michelangelo got paid to produce images that promoted certain power structures and individuals (the Medici, the Catholic Church, etc.) and not just because his benefactors wanted to create beautiful objects.

Creators get paid for drawing attention to something via the content they create. No one watches them because they are promoting VPN ads. This is not substantially different from a Renaissance artist creating a painting that promotes Catholicism.

If anything, the fact that modern creators are funded in ways explicitly and obviously "separate" from their creative work would imply that the work itself is less bound by patron requirements and more by the (more pure) currency of attention.

In other words, if a creator today made a video in the same manner as a Renaissance painter did, we would likely interpret it as "shilling" or somehow lacking in artistic authenticity.